


peripheral visions

by nowrunalong



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-09
Updated: 2017-02-13
Packaged: 2018-09-15 21:53:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 4,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9258845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nowrunalong/pseuds/nowrunalong
Summary: A series of unrelated f/f one-shots. Pairings can be found in the chapter index!





	1. tara/faith: hammer & axe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> hardware store AU, because it sounded like a good idea at the time.

“Hey. You got a minute?”

Tara looks up abruptly and finds herself face-to-face with a girl about her age, dark eyes and dark lips twisting into a smile at Tara’s wide-eyed surprise. Tara shifts awkwardly behind the counter, adjusting her orange apron with unnecessary care.

“Um. Yeah. You—you need something?”

“I gotta find some stuff. You know, a girl’s gotta have an axe.” The girl shrugs as though this is a perfectly normal thing to say.

“R-right.” _An axe?_ “Um. That’s—that’s aisle seven.”

“Well, come on,” the girl says. She looks at the name badge on Tara’s apron. “…Tara,” she finishes. “I got some more questions for you. Let’s walk and talk.”

Tara’s really no good at this personalized customer service stuff, but she follows Dark Eyes as the girl makes her way across the floor to aisle seven.

“See, you’re supposed to know about this stuff,” Dark Eyes says. “And I was wonderin’. What other tools do you have for—?” She makes a swinging motion with both hands, pushing her whole body into it.

“Gardening?” Tara asks, frowning.

“Right,” Dark Eyes says, although Tara suspects that isn’t what she’d meant at all. “That’s it. Gardening. You got, like… pruning shears? Wooden stakes? Hell, I should have grabbed that shit before…” She trails off with a grimace.

(Tara wants to ask " _before what?_ " but knows better than to pry into the past.)

They turn down aisle seven and Dark Eyes picks up the first axe she sees, turning it over in her hands and watching as the light gleams off the metal.

“I’m Faith, by the way,” she says.

“It’s, um. It’s nice to meet you.”

Faith snorts and swaps the axe for one on the next shelf. “How much is this?”

“Um. Twenty-six ninety-seven.”

“Damn. You don’t have one for twenty, do you?”

Tara shakes her head. “Sorry. That’s the cheapest one. What do you… um. What do you need it for? Maybe you could find… something else?”

“Yeah,” Faith says, more to herself than to Tara. She looks up. “Yeah,” she says again. “I’m, uh… Hey. How about this?” She moves further down the aisle and grabs a sledgehammer off the display, giving it an experimental swing. When she turns back to face Tara, she’s grinning. “Like the feel of this.”

“Oh. Good," Tara says, baffled. “That one’s…” She moves closer and checks the shelf—“Nineteen ninety-seven.”

“ _Wicked._ ”

“Is-is that all? ‘Cause you mentioned before…” Tara’s voice switches to a mumble, “about gardening…”

“Nah. I was just, you know. Tryin’ to find the best tool for the job.”

“And an axe and—and a sledgehammer? Can do the same job?”

“Don’t worry about it, T.”

“I’m not worried,” Tara says, unconvincingly.

And she isn’t. Or at least, she’s not worried about what Faith’s about to do with her new purchase. She’s worried about the girl herself. She’s worried about what led her here, alone, to buy a sledgehammer in this big box hardware store with her last twenty dollars. Tara can see her aura: it’s dark like her eyes, but not because of the nature of Faith herself. The darkness is where she’s been. Where she still is.

_What she’s running from?_

“Come back anytime,” Tara says, as she bags the sledgehammer with the receipt.

“I won't,” Faith says. “Never look back.”

But she turns to wink at Tara before disappearing through the automatic doors.


	2. buffy/willow: a caffeinated beverage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> buffy/willow + tea for gostelee on tumblr!

“What is this?” Buffy asks, twirling her cup around in the middle of the table.

Willow looks up from her absentminded gazing-into-space and fixes Buffy with a nervous stare. She can only hold the eye contact for a second before glancing away again.

“It’s tea. You ordered it. A London fog, remember?”

“What is…” Buffy gestures between the two of them with the hand that had been twirling the cup, “…this?”

“I d-don’t know… What do you mean?”

_It’s not like Buffy knows that—_

“Xander said you asked him not to come.” There’s a tiny smile playing around Buffy’s mouth, but— _no_ , Willow is probably imagining it.

“Xander is a blabbermouth.”

“So?” Buffy prompts her. “What’s goin’ on? D’you need to tell me something?”

Willow breathes the tiniest sigh of relief and hopes that Buffy doesn’t notice. “Yeah,” she says. “But it’s… it’s not important anymore.” She smiles, hoping that’ll be the end of that.

_No such luck._

“You sure?” Buffy asks. She pokes Willow lightly on the arm. “You know that you can tell me anything, right?”

_Not this._

“Really, Buffy—it’s nothing. I just wanted, you know… some girl time.”

“ _Ooh_ ,” Buffy says excitedly. “Let me guess. There’s a boy?”

“There’s no boy.”

“Oh.” Buffy frowns. “No one?”

“I didn’t say that.”

 _Oops_ , Willow thinks. She shuffles anxiously in her seat, wishing again for a change of subject.

“Wil,” Buffy says. She speaks slowly and clearly, smile still threatening to break out across her beautiful face. Willow wishes that she could look anywhere else, but she can’t—not when Buffy says her name like that, like it’s something precious and cherished. “What is this?” She pauses again. “Is this a date?”

“It’s not a date!” Willow stammers. “It-it’s a caffeinated beverage.”

“What if I wanted it to be a date?”

“Y-you want it to be a date?”

“What if I did?”

“Well, then… me, too.”

“Glad we’re on the same page,” Buffy says, and she’s smiling for real now, radiant, as she stands up and finishes off her tea. “Wanna hit the Bronze? I’m tired of sitting.”

“It’s a second date,” Willow agrees happily, and entwines her fingers with Buffy’s on the way out the door.


	3. amy/faith: habits

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> very vaguely inspired by habits by tove lo. for emofaith on tumblr!

Amy swallows the last of her martini and whips around when someone taps her on the shoulder, nearly hitting whomever it is in the face with her glass.

‘ _Whomever it is_ ’ turns out to be the guy she’d been dancing with earlier. Or— _nope_. Guys, plural. Both of ‘em. She kind of wishes she _had_ accidentally hit one of them.

“Yes?” she asks, granting them a charming-yet-impatient smile.

“We’re not finished dancing,” Guy One says.

“Me neither,” Amy tells him. “But I’m finished dancing with you.”

“Hey, baby,” Guy Two says. “That’s no fair. You can’t get us all worked up like that and then leave us alone.” He makes to tug on Amy’s waist, but just as Amy’s preparing to zap his sorry ass, the guy’s on the ground several feet away, clutching his stomach.

“Pretty sure she said _fuck off_ , losers.”

Amy tilts her head, meeting the other girl’s eye. The other girl winks back at her.

She’s hot. She’s also very strong and obviously prone to using violence as a first-choice solution, which means that Amy has a pretty good guess as to who she might be.

“You’re a Slayer.”

The girl bristles: Amy’s statement has clearly unnerved her a little bit.

“I’m Faith,” Faith says. “What do _you_ know about Slayers?”

“I’m a witch. I’m not clueless.”

Guy One looks back and forth between the two of them, and then to the prone figure of his friend, still moaning on the floor. “What’s your deal, bitch?” he asks Faith.

“Hmm,” says Amy, looking at him as if she’d just remembered he was there, and then there are sparks and he’s… gone. Entirely gone.

“What the fuck?” Faith asks.

“Oh, he’s just outside,” Amy tells her nonchalantly. “Doubt he’ll come back in, though. Not unless he wants his ass handed to him. I’m Amy. You wanna dance?”

Faith shrugs, apparently deciding that she doesn’t care what Amy may or may not know about her. Sometimes you just gotta keep going. Amy knows the feeling: the letting-go-to-forget is the reason she comes here. They move through the crowd together, dancing like fools, hands moving from shoulders to waist to hips and back up again. The lights—yellow, red, blue—shine off Faith’s skin, sparkle in her eyes, and Amy doesn’t know her at all but she’s a little bit in love with the moment.

Faith leans in when the fifth song ends, lips brushing Amy’s ear: “You wanna get out of here?”

Amy does.


	4. tara/faith: guides

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> jess (slutorama) asked for tara/faith angst. i don't know what this is tbh, but it turned out more quiet than sad.
> 
> post-chosen, faith goes on her desert quest and has a conversation with someone unexpected.

Faith still isn’t sure why she’d agreed to do the whole sacred quest thing, but maybe watching a whole town collapse into the earth makes a chick introspective like that. Giles had offered to come with her, but Faith had opted to go it alone, accepting his car with a promise that she wouldn’t die and leave it there alone in the middle of the desert.

She walks for a long time, bare toes in the sand, shoes stuffed into her backpack, and doesn’t stop to build a fire til after nightfall. Once the fire is roaring, Faith settles down against a rock and holds out her hands, enjoying the heat in the chilly evening.

A few minutes later, a girl sits down next to her, pulling her legs up to her chest like she’s cold.

“Uh,” Faith says, because this was a turn of events she hadn’t expected. “You sure you got the right fire pit?”

“Guides can come in different forms,” the girl replies softly.

“Buffy’s was a big cat,” Faith says, nodding. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but the cat’s a helluva lot more badass. I’m really not really digging the clothes, for starters.”

The girl looks away and hugs her legs closer.

“It’s nothin’ personal,” Faith says, in lieu of an apology. “Just, you know. Question of curiosity or whatever: _can_ you change them? Or are you,” she waves a hand around, “stuck in that shirt forever?”

“There _are_ better questions you could be asking.”

Faith frowns as she takes in the girl’s awkward demeanor and frumpy clothes. “Have we met before?”

“Once.”

“At the Bronze,” Faith says, finishing the thought. “So you’re a real girl, huh?”

The girl doesn’t answer. Faith tries to remember her name, but it’s not coming to her. To her credit, that whole day had been a bit of a whirlwind, what with the body-swapping and the nearly-getting-arrested.

“Tara,” her guide says. “That’s my name.”

Faith frowns. “Hey. No thought-reading.”

“I wasn’t,” Tara says. “Don’t worry. I’m not here to invade your privacy or anything. I’m just here to teach you something. But first… you have to figure out what you want to learn.”

Shrugging, Faith turns back to stare into the fire.

“Why did you come here?” Tara prompts her gently.

“Why you?” Faith asks, ignoring the question. “Why are _you_ here?”

“I think we’re similar in a lot of ways.”

“Yeah?”

Tara uncurls herself a little and stretches out her arms to feel the heat, an echo of Faith’s pose.

“It’s nice here,” Tara says, closing her eyes.

“Real peachy. Look, I don’t know, okay? This wasn’t my idea. I told Giles I was feelin’ kinda restless and he went on and on about this soul-searching bullshit til I told him I’d do it.”

“You could have gone anywhere,” Tara points out.

_She’s got you there, Lehane._

Faith shakes her head. “Fuck it. This was a bad idea. I should go.” But she doesn’t get up, and she doesn’t move her hands away from the fire.

“You say a lot of things you don’t mean. Why is that?”

“I thought I was supposed to be asking the questions, T?”

Tara smiles crookedly. “Ask away.”

It’s hard. No—it’s damn near _impossible_ to put emotions into words and tweak them into questions that can be spoken aloud.

“I was alone, too,” Tara says, unprompted. “For a long time—all my life, really. Until I met Willow and the Scoobies. But I wasn’t sad about it, ‘cause I felt like… like it was what I deserved. To be alone. To be… unloved. And it was what… what th-they told me. So I believed them.” She closes her eyes again and takes a deep breath. “I think… I think you know what I mean.”

If it were anywhere else—any _one_ else—Faith would have scoffed and made some kind of sarcastic comment, sharp words flying from her mouth like arrows to deflect any semblance of a serious conversation. But this isn’t anywhere or anyone else. It’s just Faith, and Tara, and an empty desert.

“Yeah,” she says simply.

They sit in silence for a while, listening to the fire crackling merrily as it eats its way up the branches Faith had collected.

“So what’s the lesson?” Faith asks. “You said I was supposed to learn somethin’ here.”

“You’re not gonna like it.”

Faith rolls her eyes and shifts in the sand to face Tara. “Why not?”

“Because I can’t just _tell_ you.”

“So—what?”

“It’s a riddle, of sorts. It’s kinda cryptic.”

“Fuck that.”

Tara smiles apologetically. “Do you want to hear it?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Faith says. “Hit me with it.”

Tara nods. “Okay.” She turns to look Faith in the eye. “If you walk alone, you will be alone. Open your eyes. There will be others around you, and they will see your heart. If you look through their eyes, you’ll see it, too.”

“Did _you_ write that? 'Cause if so, we're gonna have a confrontation.”

“No. It came from her.”

“Who?”

“The first Slayer.”

“So you’re—what? Her mouthpiece?”

“She has many.”

Faith sighs, dropping her hands from her knees to the sand, picking up a handful and throwing it into the darkness behind her. “You _know_ I’ll never figure out what that means, right?”

“Of course you will. You just have to give it time.”

They’re quiet for a moment longer.

“I have to go soon,” Tara says, although she makes no move to stand up.

“Got a hotter date lined up?” Faith smiles teasingly. “‘Cause if that’s the case, I’d like to meet her.”

“I’m just… I’m not allowed to stay very long.”

“Wait,” Faith says, realization striking her in the face like an open palm.

Tara smiles, answering the unspoken question, and it’s both comforting and tragic.

“Damn. The good ones just keep goin’.”

Tara stays til Faith has fallen asleep, two hours later. She’s gone when Faith wakes up. There’s no imprint in the sand where she had sat—nothing at all to indicate that she had been there except for the words she’d left with Faith.


	5. buffy/cordelia: bruises

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> cordelia patches buffy up after a patrol. established relationship.
> 
> for elise (seahenge) on tumblr <3

“I’m fine,” Buffy says, for the sixteenth time.

“You don’t look fine,” Cordelia tells Buffy, squinting at Buffy’s bruises. “Your face is all purple. I mean, let’s be honest: it’s not a good look.”

“I didn’t exactly head out earlier like, ‘ _ooh_ , I _really_ hope I get my face pummelled tonight so that I can go home and get asked questions about if I’m getting into gang fights again.’ Just—help me cover this up, okay?”

“You’ve gotten into gang fights? Wow.” Cordelia sounds generally interested as she leans forward to dab cover-up over the bruise on Buffy’s left cheekbone.

“No,” Buffy says tiredly. “That’s just what my mom thinks.”

The pair of them are exhausted enough that companionable silence reigns in the library for a few minutes as Cordelia fixes up Buffy’s face.

“I think that’s the best I can do,” Cordelia says finally. “Wanna see?”

“Gimme,” Buffy says, holding her hand out for the compact mirror. “Ooh. You’re a wizard, Cordy. I can’t see the purple at all.”

“I know.” Cordelia can’t help the smug little smirk that creeps onto her face. “I told you I’m good.” She leans forward and kisses Buffy on the cheek.

“Hey! Don’t smudge the magic makeup.” But Buffy smiles and scooches over on the library table so that she’s thigh-to-thigh with Cordelia, and rests her head on her shoulder.

“Mmm. Can we stay here? I don’t wanna move.”

“If you don’t go home, your mom might think you got killed in a gang fight.”

Buffy thinks she can feel the smirk on Cordelia’s face, even though she can’t see it.

“You’re….” She yawns. “…Probably right.”

It’s a while longer before either of them gets up to go home.


	6. willow/anya: elevators

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> willow & anya help to move buffy's stuff out of her dorm room. s5.

“I don’t see why you can’t just magic all of Buffy’s stuff to her house,” Anya’s saying, face obscured behind the lamp she’s so helpfully carrying to the elevator. “You know. Zip! Gone. And all of us get to breathe a little easier, knowing that our backs haven’t begun to bend prematurely under the weight of all this _stuff_. Humans already have such pathetically short lifespans, and now you all want me to live mine like that little old lady who walks up and down the street every morning with her little grocery cart?”

“It’s not that much stuff,” Willow says easily. She’s carrying two boxes, both weighing considerably more than a lamp, and while the usage of magic is tempting… they’re in the middle of a college dormitory, where zipping boxes up and down the halls is strictly a no-no.

Anya peers past the lampshade to look at her suspiciously. “Are you sure you didn’t steal some of Buffy’s super strength? You’re awfully chipper for someone tricked into doing manual labour at nine in the morning.”

“Buffy’s my friend,” Willow says, as they stop outside the elevator. “I like helping her. Can you get the button? My hands are kinda full.”

Anya moves the lamp to the crook of one arm and jabs the Down button with her free hand.

“And what do you mean, ‘tricked’?” Willow asks, as the elevator doors open. She passes through them, Anya behind her. “Hit the ground floor button?”

Anya obliges again, and the doors close.

“Xander said we going out for waffles.”

“We did go for waffles.”

“Cafeteria waffles.”

“Better’n no waffles,” Willow says. “‘Sides, the caf food isn’t so bad. And they get the good kind of syrup. Did we stop?”

“Stop what?”

“The elevator. It stopped moving, but we’re between floors.”

“Well, if the lights go out, we have this handy-dandy lamp,” Anya says, voice tinged with sarcasm. “Can you make it go?”

“The lamp?”

“The elevator!”

“Oh. No. I think we have to press the Help button.”

Willow sets her two boxes down on the ground.

“How long til help gets here?”

“I don’t know,” Willow says, and plunks down on the ground next to the boxes.

After a moment, Anya sits down next to her.

—

“What’s in the boxes?” Anya asks, after they’ve been sitting in silence for five minutes. “Anything good? Maybe there’s something useful we could use to get out. Ooh! You could do a spell!”

“What kind of spell?” Willow asks, frowning.

“To make the elevator go.”

Willow shakes her head. “I don’t think so. Besides, there are some things I’m not comfortable mixing—magic and mechanical stuff being a couple of ‘em. And the boxes are odds and ends from Buffy’s drawers. I don’t know if we should go through her stuff without her permission.”

“Oh, come on,” Anya wheedles. “Aren’t you bored?”

Willow is, a little. Still that doesn’t mean she’s gonna—

“I’ll do it,” Anya says, and pries open the top box.

The odds and ends aren’t nearly as personal as Willow had expected. There are some odd socks, a couple jars of holy water, pencils, crumpled up notes, a set of dice, and a book of poetry.

—

They play dice on the floor of the elevator.

“Three sixes!” Anya trumpets. “Am I winning again?”

“Yup.”

“Oh, goody!”

It would be too easy to manipulate the dice with magic, but Willow’s playing fair. It’s not like she has anything to win here, after all. Nothing but the grin on Anya’s face when _she_ wins, which is reason enough not to cheat.

—

The elevator mechanics of Sunnydale must have all taken a vacation day at the same time because, an hour later, the elevator still hadn’t budged an inch. They’d exhausted their game of dice, and Willow had settled into one corner with the poetry book while Anya had retrieved the lamp she’d been carrying, spinning the lampshade restlessly with an index finger.

“Will you stop that?” Willow asks, after putting up with it for a good ten minutes.

“What do you want me to do? There’s nothing to do.”

Willow frowns. “I don’t know. Just… not that.”

“You could read to me,” Anya suggests. “That only sounds mildly boring, which would be a change from incredibly boring.”

“Sure,” Willow agrees, a little surprised. “That sounds good.”

Anya scoots across the elevator floor so that she’s jammed next to Willow in the corner, peering over her shoulder at the open book.

“Okay. I’m ready. Read.”

—

When the elevator finally opens to the ground floor, Anya’s fast asleep, head on Willow’s shoulder.


	7. buffy/tara: new moon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> buffysummere prompted buffy x tara  
> restfield prompted 'what if Tara got turned into werewolf during "New Moon Rising"?' / tara x anyone
> 
> this is these two prompts, combined!

Buffy stands with Tara outside the door. Tara's trembling slightly, clearly not feeling as well as she’s been pretending all afternoon. 

“Scared?” Buffy asks sympathetically.

Tara shakes her head quickly. “N-no.” At Buffy’s quirked eyebrow, she sighs. “Well, yeah. I mean… it’s not every day you, you know… grow fur and…” Tara puts up her hands, curling her fingers to imitate claws. “Grr.”

Buffy smiles.

“And—and then there’s…”

“What?” prompts Buffy. “You can tell me anything.”

“It’s just…” Tara frowns. “You guys. You… You’re being so helpful. I… I really appreciate it. I didn’t think… I-I don’t deserve…”

“Tara,” Buffy says. “You got bitten by a werewolf. That doesn’t make you a monster. That makes you… well, okay, that makes you a werewolf. But you’re _still_ a person. You just get kind of grouchy and hairy a couple nights a month, and really—who doesn’t? You deserve all the help we can offer you. Personally, I’d offer you more help if I could. This cage doesn’t really do it for me, you know, I’d rather you stay in a five-star wolfy hotel, complete with jacuzzi, but this is what we’ve got.”

Tara laughs a little, and Buffy smiles again.

“Will it make it harder?” Tara asks. “I mean… Will it be harder to… for someone else to…” She looks down at the ground and doesn’t finish her sentence.

Buffy understands.

“What do you know about Angel?” Buffy asks.

Tara looks up. “Not very much, really. Willow’s mentioned the name before, but that’s it.”

“He was a vampire. Well—still _is_ a vampire. And I loved him. Him being a vampire… it made things different in certain ways. You know, we couldn’t go out for ice cream on a sunny July afternoon. But it didn’t make it harder to love him. It’s like, the vamp part of him was just one small part of what made up his personality.”

Buffy takes Tara’s hands in her own.

“Just like you being a werewolf is only one small part of who you are. And people are gonna love you. They’re gonna love all of you, werewolf part and all.”

“Buffy?” Tara asks, still holding Buffy’s hands as the moon begins to rise in the sky.

“Yeah?”

“Will you stay with me? I… I don’t want to be alone.”

“All night,” Buffy promises, and Tara lets go.


	8. buffy/cordelia: vision girls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> inspired by a prompt from umadsummers on tumblr!
> 
> (you can find me @angelandfaith.)

Cordelia remembers something, when the visions get worse. It’s an old memory, now: high school feels so far away. In her junior year, Buffy had had a dream about Angel dying, and then the next day he’d become Angelus. Cordelia remembers her tossing and turning in the library. Remembers the worried looks on the faces of everyone around her. Remembers the _truth_ of what she’d seen.

“Slayer dreams,” Buffy says, when Cordelia asks. Her voice crackles a little over the phone. “They come with the package. Why are you asking?”

Cordelia isn’t sure, really. This is probably silly. “Nevermind,” she says. “I just thought it was weird, okay?”

“You called me up to ask about something weird that happened four years ago? _That’s_ weirder than any dream I’ve had, and I've had some wacky ones.”

“If you want to know—I was calling to say ‘hi’, and… ‘welcome back to life.’”

“No you didn’t.”

Cordelia sighs. “No, I didn’t. There’s just… something I wanted to talk about, and I didn’t know who else to call.”

“So you called _me_?”

“It’s about your weird dreams. Can you not ask so many questions? God.”

“What do you want, Cordelia?”

“Do your dreams ever hurt?”

The words come out more quickly than Cordelia had intended, and they halt Buffy in her tracks at the other end of the line.

“‘Hurt’ meaning what, exactly?” Buffy asks slowly. “‘Hurt’ meaning the feeling of getting stabbed in the gut with your own stake, or ‘hurt’ meaning the heartache of getting ripped out of—uh, the heartache of your, your _heart_ , getting ripped out of your chest when you’re forced to watch your boyfriend die before your eyes?”

“Geez, specific much? I just meant physical pain.”

“Then, no,” Buffy says.

There’s silence on the line for a moment.

“Why are you asking?” Buffy asks, finally. She sounds concerned. “Is it Angel?”

“No,” Cordelia says quickly. “Angel’s fine. Or—Angel’s Angel, you know? Like I said, it’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

The last thing Cordelia needs is another set of people trying to figure out if something’s wrong with her. She’ll figure this out on her own. Maybe some stronger pain meds…

“If there’s a problem… ignoring it won’t make it go away. Are you sure I can’t help?”

“It’s fine,” Cordelia says, and why hasn’t she hung up yet? Why had she even called? “I really don’t want to worry anyone, okay?"

“I know the feeling,” Buffy says.

More silence.

“Buffy?” Cordelia asks.

“Hm?”

“I really am glad you’re alive.”

—

It’s the tiniest bit comforting, Cordelia thinks, after she hangs up. As long as Buffy’s around, she’s not the only Vision Girl in the world.

Maybe someday she’ll be able to tell her that.


	9. amy/faith: doing time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> for @alkenifanfiction, who sent me the fantastic prompt of faith & amy as cellmates.

There’s only one other girl in the cell when Faith’s led through the door and it gets locked behind her. She’s sprawled out across her bunk like she owns the place—which, Faith supposes, she kind of does.

The girl’s eyes flicker up from her magazine and look Faith up and down with some amount of interest.

“So. You’re the new girl.”

“Guess I am.”

“I’m Amy. What’re you in for?”

“Faith. Burned down a church.”

Amy snickers a little. “Did you really?”

“Nah,” Faith says, sitting down on the bunk opposite Amy and hunkering forward, legs spread, arms crossed, elbows on knees. “Would be funny though, wouldn’t it?”

“Definitely ironic.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Faith says. “Ironic. How ‘bout you? You look like the type of chick who’d stab a dude.”

“I’m not so direct,” Amy says enigmatically.

“Whatever that means.”

“It means I’m not so direct.”

“You’re not gonna poison me in my sleep, are you? ‘Cause if that’s the case, I don’t think we’re gonna get along.”

“I think I get the say on whether or not we get along, newbie,” Amy says, sitting up.

Faith’s crossed the distance between them in a split second, pinning Amy to wall with a forearm. “I could kill you with one hand,” she says.

“You hot for… a life sentence?” Amy manages.

Faith pushes for another second and then lets go.

“Just lettin’ you know who’s boss around here. I—what the fuck?”

Her pillow is on fire. _Literally_ up in flames.

“How did you do that?”

“Not so directly,” Amy says, raising an eyebrow.

Faith grins, understanding, and Amy grins back.

Hell. This might be fun.


End file.
